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Tyan Thunder K8W (S2885) instabilities

Well I finally have a stable system, but it came as a cost. Here is my story:

The first board I got from the place I bought it from was okay at first. After loading WinXP Professional, drivers, and Windwos Update (SP1a included) I found out that the bootup screen was very slow when it appeared for the first time. I am talking about when the WinXP Pro logo first comes to the screen after a blank screen. This was one problem that eeked me.

Another problem I had was that the computer would just hang after a shutdown and random reboot within 2 secs of being in WinXP after a cold boot. This I thought was a memory problem, but never got around to really checking it because the system would reboot when memtest86 was loading. Hmm...

I went back to the place I bought it (Monarch Computer) and they gladly replaced most of the parts we bought from them: mobo, ram, psu, etc. I came back home and installed WinXP Pro again. Same exact things were happening!!! So now I thought, it has to be a software thing. I reformatted and reinstalled WinXP. Now I installed one thing at a time and checked for instabilities (the random reboot, slowness at startup, and no shutdown).

What it came down to was the install of the EIDE driver in the AMD Driver Pack 2.0 on AMD's website and Tyan's. Immediately after the install of that particular driver the slowness at startup and no shutdown creeped its ugly head. The random reboot is caused by enabling ECC in the BIOS eventhough my memory is ECC compatible.

Eventhough the EIDE driver is not installed, WinXP Pro still finds my DVD burner that is connected to the Primary IDE channel. The ECC thing I do not mind because the system is rock stable. When it comes down to it I think it is still a memory issue, but I do not feel like going back and trying to mess with the system again.

1) ECC problems
Initially I started getting ECC errors in the event log. I switched the chips around and Windows would then refuse to boot (BSOD). Fixed by trying every memory config until finding one that works, and re-installing Windows.

Mark7305, your memtest86 error can be fixed by using memtest86+ instead. Do you get any errors in that? How long did the full extended test suite take? It took me around 20 hours to complete (using DDR 333)

I still have one remaining problem: stand-by. When I go into stand-by, go out of stand-by, and then try to turn off the pc, it will just stall with a black screen. All leds working, fans still turning. Have you tried this?